25th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B, 2012)

Sunday, 23 September 2012

 

Entrance	Be thou my vision
Kyrie	(Dinah Reindorf)
Gloria	Psallite
Psalm	Ps 53 (Laurence Bévenot)
Gospel Acclamation	St Agatha Alleluia (mcb)
Preparation of the Gifts	Make me a channel of your peace
Sanctus, Acclamation, Amen	Mass of Creation (Marty Haugen)
Agnus Dei	from No Greater Love (Michael Joncas)
Communion	In the Lord (Taizé) (alternative words by Paul Inwood)
Postcommunion	Cantique de Jean Racine (Gabriel Fauré, 1845–1924)
Recessional	O God our help in ages past

 

Today’s second reading, from St James, speaks of peace:

Peacemakers, when they work for peace, sow the seeds which will bear fruit in holiness.

We sang Sebastian Temple’s much loved setting of the text often known as the Prayer of St Francis, but which actually seems to have been first published in 1912 in France. As a child in school I remember singing it with the section beginning O master, grant that I may never seek… used as a refrain separating the verses. In recent hymn books that section is usually labelled verse 3, with the first two verses sung in succession before it. I like it better with the recurring refrain, and I’m pleased that the version we sang today – William Llewellyn’s arrangement from the RSCM collection Sing with all my soul takes the same view.

We haven’t sung the Angus Dei from Michael Joncas’s collection No Greater Love for two or three years. Its verses, drawn from 1 Corinthians 10, John 6 and the Didache, are (I imagine) out of line with the prescriptions regarding sticking to the text, which accompanied the introduction of the new translation of the Missal last year. So we confined ourselves to three repetitions of the strong and memorable refrain, with just a bar in between on the organ to catch one’s breath. I thought it worked well.